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VMWARE home install

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Hi,

I've got a small budget to get another laptop or desktop to do a test install for free version of ESX at home.

Would something like the below 2 options be possible or is ESX very fussy with specific makes or hardware required:

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White boxing is fine, where you're going to have an issue is ram, ideally you want a minimum of 2gb of ram for ESXi on it's on, never mind any actual VM's you want to run.

I have to be honest and say you would be better off buying something a little more dedicated towards virtualisation or at least something with a little more ram.

What are you planning to run the ESXi software via? Workstation or VMware Player?

thanks for the advice Simon. I think I was planning to use the vmware player. i'm not sure my budget can stretch enough to get a good server to install esx properly so may have to give this idea a miss. i've not bought a PC/server for a while now so not entirely sure how much i'd need to save to get adequate hardware for this.

With a small budget have you considered doing your own build? For the same money you have to spend I am sure you could build something better than what you have listed, and more importantly could bulk up the Ram as part of the build.

You could probably even save a few pound on picking up some less crucial parts such as case second hand etc.

Well, I have a Lenovo TS200 that was up for sale, looking for about £350, it's got 16GB ram, Xeon X3460 (2.8ghz CPU) and runs ESXi perfectly (using that to run the OS rather than layering it on top of another OS). You can pretty much use it headless as well (ie without a monitor\kb).

Let me know if I can be of help because I have some of the components up for sale at the moment individually (CPU alone was a £200 upgrade).

For £400 I would throw in the M1015 raid controller with the RAID5 feature key (feature key was £100 on it's own) and 4 drive trays (again they cost between £10 and £20 per tray).

All in it was a cracking server (I had 4 of them, just upgraded to 2x 32GB shuttles over the last two months at a cost of £600 per box, so have been selling them off, just got this last one left).

Have you thought about a HP Microserver?
It can take 16GB RAM and I have mine running ESXI with 4-5 VM's simultaneously

I think the £100 cashback deal has ended now, but theres always a few going for around the £150 mark on eBay.
Add £75 ish for 2 x 8GB sticks (make sure you get one that will work)

And thats about it. . . I run mine headless in a cupboard and connect to it wirelessly

Click to expand...

If you can get it on a cashback deal (never know it may restart) then this option IMO. Craigie managed to study and pass the View exam using 2 of these and a HP ML 115 for storage I believe (Lab | vmFocus). I also used the Microserver to run two ESXi hosts (running Windows 7 as the OS as its my HTPC also) to pass the VCP5-DV.

Alternatively, have a look at the AutoLab project (google "vmware autolab"), which uses VMware Workstation to set up a nested lab. With cheap RAM (I bought 32GB RAM for my custom-build i5 for circa £100), and a decent processor you're well on your way. Make sure you get an SSD to ensure fast boot-up times / good IOPs for your VMs.

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